One Person's Gain

Abstract

Most of this book has been about plants of a hundred or more people, because that is where the research was done. But the idea at its centre does not depend on size. A firm that asks the people closest to the work what they know, answers them, makes one number visible and returns some of what is saved is doing something a household can do at a kitchen table and a single person can do with their own working week. This chapter brings the idea down to that scale. It is written for a reader who does not run a plant: someone who shares a household budget, works as an employee inside a firm they do not control, or works alone. It offers no advice about investments or savings products, and it promises no particular result. What it offers is a way of reading one's own economic life through the same four questions the earlier chapters asked of firms: who knows what, who answers, what can be seen, and what comes back.